As part of a three-play rep season, The Faction are reviving Friedrich Schiller's first play, which he started writing when he was only 19. It's a bold, brave enterprise and you have to admire the commitment of all concerned. At the same time I can't help wishing that an already overheated play had been cooled down rather than heated up.

Writing in 1781, Schiller was clearly besotted with Shakespeare in that he stole the Edmund-Edgar subplot from King Lear while spicing it up with a dash of Richard III and Hamlet. His story of sibling hatred starts with the evil Franz von Moor persuading his father to disinherit his elder brother, Karl. In retaliation the outlawed Karl takes to the Bohemian woods at the head of a band of ruthless brigands.

Within the play, which had a galvanising effect on its original Mannheim audience and which is one of the landmarks of European Romanticism, there is a fascinating debate about the conflict between libertarian idealism and lawless anarchy. But Schiller eventually allows the ideas to be subordinated to a plot that echoes the absurdities of Lear: when the disguised Karl returns to his native castle, you wonder why on earth he doesn't declare himself both to his devoted lover, Amalia, and to his captive father.

Mark Leipacher, who has directed the play and co-translated it with Daniel Millar, certainly exploits the Shakespearean echoes. Andrew Chevalier plays the wicked Franz as a snickering demon who uses physical disability to justify moral defectiveness, and Tom Radford as Karl has more than a touch of Hamlet's mix of dither and danger – he even greets his imprisoned father as if he were a ghost.

But the production, which is full of guns, noise and rhetoric, also has Karl at one point frenziedly beating his head against a wall, and his followers advancing towards a bloodbath in the stylised, slow-motion manner of Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch. I was grateful for the calming presence of Jeryl Burgess, who, in two roles transposed to the female gender, spoke Schiller's lines with rapt quietness rather than shouting them from the rooftops.

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